


Watermark

by tawg



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: First Time Meeting, I see better from a distance, M/M, Paperwork, Pool Hottie Coulson, Pre-Movie, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-04
Updated: 2012-08-04
Packaged: 2017-11-11 09:24:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,686
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/477045
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tawg/pseuds/tawg
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clint needs some help with his paperwork. He gets some eye candy instead.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Watermark

The way Clint saw it, his job was to shoot things. He was good at his job. There should have been no issues whatsoever with Clint, his job, and the appreciation of goodness. But, because SHIELD was a government agency, they couldn’t just let people do their jobs. They made people write mission reports, fill in order forms, spend hours of their life staring without comprehension at the annual Individual Assessment and Future Goals form.

Clint thought that it was fucking ridiculous that, on top of all of that, he was also responsible for hunting down the guy he was meant to direct all Individual Assessment inquiries to. Agent Coulson, whoever he was, apparently had an allergy to being in his office. Clint had tried dropping by at random times of the day, tried leaving notes, tried setting up motion detectors in the office so that he would be alerted to Coulson’s return. 

“He’s been up in Alaska,” the agent with the office next to Coulson had told Clint after his second day of just plain camping out in front of Coulson’s door.

Clint looked up at the agent with the best puppy dog eyes he could muster. “I need help with this?” he said, offering the Individual Assessment form out to her. She actually backed away, holding her hands up to ward off the paperwork.

“Woah, no. Not my division. I don’t even let my fingerprints get on those. But Coulson will be in tomorrow.”

“Great,” Clint said as he hauled himself up off the ground. His lower back cracked, and it felt good. “I’ll get him bright and early.”

“He’ll probably be down at the pool most of tomorrow morning,” the agent said as she turned away and unlocked her own office.

“We have a pool?”

“Yup,” she said with a grin. “And Phil Coulson is the captain of the swim team. He hits the pool at five.”

Well, Clint thought, that sounded disgustingly goal-oriented. 

*

Clint got up at five the next day. The way he saw it, enough of his life had been wasted on the absent Agent Coulson and the ridiculous forms that he chose to inflict on others. Clint would get this whole thing done and dusted early, and then have the rest of the day to cleanse himself. His cleansing plans largely involved the Disney channel and a bag of Cheetos. 

He had the Cheetos and the largest travel mug he could find filled with coffee with him when he made his way down to the swimming pool in the basement of the Training and Medical centre. He had to admire the foresight SHIELD had in putting the doctors in the same building as the people who were practicing how to kill one another. So Clint was armed with snacks, his now overdue Individual Assessment form, and two black pens that were full of ink. His handler was threatening to divert all of Clint’s range time into linguistics and IT training. There was no way the form was going to remain incomplete for another day.

At first Clint thought the pool was deserted, and he regretted not bringing a small explosive device down with him through which he could express his disappointment. Then he saw the figure moving through the water.

Clint had been swimming before. There had been school excursions and rare days in summer when the orphanage had scraped together enough money to set the kids loose at the local pool. At the circus, going around various small towns in summer and hitting up the local pool with the bearded lady and the strong man (who were sometimes the same person, depending on whether Lars was taking time off to visit family) had been some of the most enjoyable moments of Clint’s late-teenage years. He knew how swimming worked: you got thrown in the pool, you splashed around and maybe covered some distance, people clapped and cheered while you frantically dragged yourself up the ladder and then quietly threw up some gross pool water into the grass, and then you threw someone else in the deep end.

Clint had never seen someone swim like Agent Coulson. The man was silent, no gasping breaths and splashing (as far as Clint was concerned, it was the splashing that kept you from drowning, right?). Just smooth, controlled movements. His body a long, lean line cutting silently through the water. He reached the end of the lane, tucked his body into a tight roll, and kicked off the wall of the pool without breaking the surface of the water. Agent Coulson had to be part fish. That was the only possible explanation.

Not knowing how else to get Agent Coulson’s attention, Clint crouched down at the end of the lane as Coulson swam towards it, stuck his hand in the water, and waved it around. The pool was not heated. The water was freezing. Clint was pretty sure that frostbite was a very real issue. Agent Coulson curved his back as he shot towards the end of the pool, brought his legs forwards and under his body, and slid a hand out of the water, gripping the edge of the pool just by the toe of Clint’s boot. He looked up at Clint, and for a long moment Clint stared back. 

“I, uh. I need help with a form,” Clint said at last.

Coulson gestured with a flick of his head for Clint to step back, and then planted his other hand on the side of the pool and neatly pulled himself out. Clint had no idea how he’d done it, but one moment there were hands on the side of the pool and head and shoulders above water, and the next Agent Coulson was standing in from of him, dripping wet and scantily clad in his bathers. Coulson wiped at the water dripping into his eyes with an equally wet and drippy hand, and seemed mildly annoyed at the lack of any real change in the volume of water running down his face. Clint grabbed a nearby towel and passed it over. Coulson dried his hands, his face, and then ran the towel back across his hair. It made some of it stick up, looking oddly soft and fluffy.

Clint had seen photos of Agent Coulson. He’d accessed the man’s files early on in the hunting process to ensure that the agent never simply snuck past him unnoticed in the hallways. Coulson’s file photo showed a serious man with a boring haircut, a boring face, and a boring suit. It gave no indication of the potential for soft, fluffy pool hair, nor did it represent at all the reality of Agent Coulson’s intensely blue eyes.

And while the file did mention that Agent Coulson was five feet and nine inches tall, it had apparently not seen the value in mentioning that he was lean without being scrawny, toned without being ripped, and very firmly ticked the ‘looks edible when dripping wet’ box. Clint wasn’t actually sure if the last box existed on the SHIELD physical assessment form, but he was considering petitioning for its addition if it wasn’t.

Clint was wearing jeans, thick socks, two shirts, and the SHIELD issue winter jacket with the fluffy collar. Phil Coulson stood in front of him wearing a pair of navy blue speedos and a single layer of chlorinated pool water. “Aren’t you cold?” Clint blurted out.

Coulson gave Clint a mild, questioning look, the one that was an unspoken request for elaboration (Natasha called it ‘SHIELD clueless face, number fourteen’). Then he ran his gaze down Clint’s body and back up again, and when he met Clint’s eyes his expressed had turned into that mix of amused judgement that just said ‘really?’. “It’s winter,” Clint said defensively. 

Coulson had the towel slung over one shoulder, and he held his hand out for the form. Clint gladly handed it over. The first page had been filled out to the best of Clint’s ability, though he noticed that Coulson stopped to read his details and had a moment of fear that he had written something unnecessarily alienating and sarcastic in the basic details section. Under ‘blood type’ Clint had written ‘liquid’, and for ‘highest level of education achieved’ he’d supplied ‘912 ft (278 m) at Waverly-Shell Rock Middle School)’. Fuck SHIELD. All of this information was on file anyway.

Then Coulson turned to the second page. The second page had significantly less smart-assery. It also had less words. In fact, it had nearly no words. And the words that were present had been thoroughly scribbled out. The exception had been under question three, ‘Describe your strengths’, where Clint had written ‘shooting things’ next to the first dot point and ‘shooting things with arrows’ by the second. He had no idea what to write for the remaining four dot points. He had a strong suspicion that the things he considered himself to be good at were also things that could lead to some kind of disciplinary hearing. 

“Just answer these questions as honestly as you can,” Coulson said mildly, handing the form back. “But off the record, everyone lies for question seven.” Then he draped his towel over Clint’s shoulder, turned, stepped up onto the side of the pool, and dived into the pool with a smooth, fluid coil and release of his body. He barely made a ripple as he entered the water.

Clint sat down on one of the bleachers, intending to stay there until the form was finished and he could quit wasting his time thinking about it. Coulson had moved on to swimming freestyle, and Clint couldn’t help but notice the roll of his torso through the water, the arc of an arm as it broke the surface and the perfect line of his back – hips raised and shoulders fluid, and the strong lines of his legs providing incredible momentum, providing heat and speed in water that was so cold and otherwise so very still.

When Coulson finally hauled himself out of the pool at seven am, Clint’s form was still incomplete.


End file.
